What exactly would "the market" be demanding in terms of Zelda if not sword fighting with your remote? 2D Zelda? Zelda Party? Zelda Fitness? Zelda Dance Hero? Zelda Sports? The whole purpose for the expanded audience is to gradually get them to try out meatier games to flesh out the audience's interests. You don't just want people playing Wii Sports and you don't want them just playing Fire Emblem. You want a nice divide so many projects have the potential for 10M in sales.

Sega's the only one to blame for the Master System failure, at the time they didn't know how to market the console, hell they didn't even know how to make a good cover for a game, with the Genesis they got a better PR department and things changed.

Also you need games like Galaxy, Zelda, Ico, etc. to keep the traditional gamers hook, you can't have a console living only on casual experiences like Wii Fit or Wii Sports or the same franchise running over and over, in fact that was one of the biggest problems with the Wii; also the so called casual market got their future games fullfiled even by other companies (Just Dance is a good example of that) but still is not enought to keep the same system running 

I'm going by the trends and rumors, now it could turn out that the rumors are completely false, and the Cafe is completely different than every rumor is saying, but its seeming less and less likely

So we know only that Wii 2 exists and Nintendo is betraying us. And 3DS failed after 2 months is having a universal userbase, sweet.

Fighting is fine, but I bet you its going to be chock full of puzzles and backtracking, and other stuff that people will not care for, if it was fighting focused then I would be more gung ho for it.

That's the problem Nintendo has been trying to do that with 3D Mario,  people keepy saying that 3D Mario sold this much, bt they neglect to mention that its  a fraction of what 2D Mario sells and it moves no hardware, but Nintendo keeps pushing it because they hope to get the 2D Mario fans to play 3D Mario, but it doesn;t work

You have to give the audience what they want, not what you want them to want

This is why gamers can't have nice things

First post FTW!

Yeah things like Nintendo not releasing the software that attracted huge audiences with the NES, it gave Sega the opening.

No actually the causual gamers didn't get their future games fulfilled, proof is in the number of games that actually support things like motion plus and the balance board, etc., very limited support, Nintendo never fulfilled the Wii promise, one or two games is not enough, which is why the expanded audience didn;t keep the Wii supported.

 games like Galaxy, M:OM, Zelda didn't keep Wii supported , look at the sales and console moving power of those games, then look at that of 2D Mario, heck 2D Mario probably sold more consoles than all of those other games comined

There in lies the difference though. Zelda has always sold worse than Mario, even in it's 2D heyday. It has nothing to gain by drastically changing it's formula, as the Zelda faithful made the transition from 2D to 3D flawlessly. By dumbing it down, you figure to alienate more of the core Zelda audience than attract newcomers. It's not a winning formula. Some series just don't have that effective mix to appeal to such a wide spectrum of game players. Zelda will eventually need something of an overhaul, but that will be to entice those tired of the formula because they've played it too many times, not because it's too complicated. Zelda already took the Wii-esque approach on the Gamecube with 4 player co-op, SNES 2D over the top graphics, taking out a lot of the length, storyline and puzzles of the single player series, and it wasn't as well received.

In regards to Mario, there's room for both. By changing it up, that core audience that enjoys both Marios don't feel they're being pumped too quickly with the same old crap over and over again. Instead of having four NSMBs or four Galaxys, there's two of each, and those that enjoy both are more likely to continue diving in. The expanded audience that won't touch Galaxy isn't going to touch NSMB four times either, so it's still a win.

1.  What missteps did Nintendo make with the SNES?  They had all of their major franchises including a fantastic 2D Mario and Mario Kart, not to mention great 3rd party support.  Remember that home consoles weren't used to seeing 100m selling systems yet...

2.  This I can agree with to a degree, especially about the balance board, but one could argue that we did see ideas expanding off of those games, they just weren't good enough or different enough to appeal to those who were sold on Wii Sports/Fit.  Games like Wii Music, Carnival Games and tons of other 3rd party shovelware are essentially trying to appeal to the expanded audience, but perhaps the desire for those market expanding games just wasn't there from a longevity standpoint.

3.  Here, what you say is certainly possible, but there's so many people who assume that Nintendo automatically means little to no 3rd party support, and that this will never change.  Why?  Look at the NES compared to the Sega Master System and Atari 7800.  I don't think anyone would argue that.  But the SNES too had nice, healthy support from 3rd parties.  Probably the biggest 3rd party game at the time, Street Fighter 2, absolutely obliterated the Genesis and TurboGrafx version's sales on SNES.  If Project Cafe is truly being created as very developer-friendly, there's no reason why we won't see third party support return to Nintendo.  It's even rumored that Rockstar has a development kit for Project Cafe and is planning GTA 5 as a possible launch game.  It won't be exclusive, but if Nintendo gets to unveil the game for their E3 conference it would be a huge coup for Project Cafe and speak volumes as to what 3rd party support could look like.